[Sigia-l] Information-centered Design (was I Want My GUT of Information Arc hitecture!)

[Faith Peterson]

Matt wrote:
...Do we think about how are one little tiny website's
content meshes with all the other related content on all the other related
websites? No, not yet. Soon, we will see organizations concerned about huge
drops in activity on their sites as people struggle through finding what
they need on the *ever-widening* "superhighway". Then, there will be a cry
for help, a cry for one spot to "get it all about furniture". And thus, it
will start. (applause, applause, blows "you are too kinds" :-) ).

The Cluetrain Manifesto may have planted this idea in my head. I am waiting
for the day that such sites start to take shape, when we stop working for
the institutions, and start working for the information.
------------------------------

Amen!

I recommend following Cluetrain with Adbusters
(http://www.adbusters.org/home/).

That corporations are money and power sinks might be the biggest issue there
is. It corrupts government and the political process, and sucks financial
and human resources, crippling society's capacity and will to address other,
more tangible, problems - like poverty, hunger, illness, war, and
environmental ruin.

So very smart and talented IAs apply all our knowledge and skills, and
MyClient has a beautifully structured, highly usable Web site that makes
money for MyClient. Have we applied our abilities to a worthy objective?

The idea that all types of information from all kinds of sources could be
brought together via nodes where non-commercial or extra-commercial
information stands on equal footing with commercial information is
attractive. Corporations pursuing their individual financial objectives to
the exclusion of all other values, however, not only crowd other information
out of the public square but also sap the ability of other ideas to be
thought or exchanged.

Some of the posts in this thread remarked upon the need of IAs to make a
living - even those of us who might grant the ethical or conceptual point
may feel that as IAs we have little enough power even to bring good
architecture to corporate Websites. And yet if we aspire to the status of
profession, we need to give more than lip service to what may be the primary
distinguishing characteristic of the traditional professions, and that is an
ethical stand and the ability to take up an organized ethical position.
Coming from "profess", it means not only learning but also the "act of
professing or claiming; open declaration; public avowal or acknowledgment;
as, professions of friendship; a profession of faith." (Merriam-Webster) If
IA really wants to stand with theology, medicine, and law - the traditional
professions - then IA has to take up the issue of ethical uses of
information and issues in information creation & delivery, access,
availability - and first and foremost truth claims, how truth is evaluated,
how IA either illuminates or obscures truth. Matt's vision is exactly the
sort of issue with which we as professionals should be concerned. Is there
some kind of a notion of "meta-truth"? Can information be locally true but
in context or in aggregate become false (or less true)? Is omitting
additional information as ethically wrong as providing wrong information? Is
there such a thing as an ethically neutral structure? There are those who
might say that content is not our concern. There were atomic scientists who
said that what the military did with fission research wasn't their concern,
either, but many of them later formed a different opinion. Somebody had to
guide the trains that took millions to the concentration camps - but he was
just a locomotive engineer trying to make a living. People look at events
elsewhere, in particular Germany mid-century, tsk-tsk-ing and marvelling at
how a citizenry could let such a thing happen. Look around - bad things
happen on a large scale when, on an individual scale, good people put
blinders on and hold their noses when they go to work.

Which is why the post several days ago under a different topic pleading with
American IAs to take a stand on the war absolutely _does_ belong here. The
issues around information, its use, and its presentation, as it relates to
using information to attempt to affect or influence domestic and
international opinion are interesting and perhaps there are tactics and
techniques used that might be worthy of discussion by IAs.

Faith Peterson
faithp at wideopenwest.com
Schaumburg, IL, USA